FLASHBACK: In 2007, Jim DeMint Praised RomneyCare, Called An Individual Mandate “Making Freedom Work For Everyone”

Here is an excellent catch from Brian Beutler who digs up South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint’s video endorsement of Mitt Romney from October of 2007. At the time DeMint was not only willing to overlook Romney’s endorsement of a tyrannical individual mandate to purchase health insurance, he specifically touted health care as an example of Romney’s ability to “look at a problem and come up with a solution” with methods that involve “making freedom work for everyone.”

Watch it:

Hello, I’m Senator Jim DeMint. A lot of my friends and my supporters across the country have asked me who I support for President. And I’ve told them: Mitt Romney. They ask, “why do you support Mitt Romney?” First of all, he’s not in Washington, DC and he spent most of his life as a businessman and not a politician. We need a president who’s not a politician, but who is a real problem solver and who’s proven over the years that he can look at a problem and come up with a solution and actually get the job done. There’s no one in the race like Mitt Romney who’s proved in business and in his volunteer work and as governor of Massachusetts that he can solve a problem. Not by creating more government but by making freedom work for everyone. He’s done it with health care, he’s done it by cutting budget deficits and not increasing taxes. We need a CEO for president who knows how to get things done.

This all serves to highlight the absurd doubletalk that the right has tied itself into over this health care business. The key features of the Affordable Care Act that seem to genuinely bother conservatives are that it’s financed through progressive taxation and it was proposed by Barack Obama. When an extremely similar proposal was on the table lacking those two features, it was regarded as a reasonable compromise. And were the right willing to approach the ACA in that spirit, it would in fact be possible to alter the revenue sources and tweak other specifics.